Battle Report: Meeting Engagement

As promised last week, I've got a quick batrep of our Battlefleet 1900 game from last weekend. We were using the new Tumbling Dice 1:2400 ships, which were a real visual treat.

The engagement was between a Russian battleship, escorted by a cruiser, and a Japanese battleship supported by three destroyers. Despite the clear firepower advantage the Russians had, destroyers have deadly torpedoes which can easily sink a larger ship.

As usual I'll stick with lightly-annotated pictures rather than a dissection.

The deployment. The Russians (in blue, at the bottom) were
travelling left-to-right when the Japanese (top, in red) attacked.

Opening moves. I was playing as Russians, so I sent in the Peresviet to soak up fire and hopefully
disable the Idzumo - allowing the lightly-armoured Izumrud to mop up the destroyers later.

Although as I was getting close, I didn't like the look of those destroyers... my boat guns put paid to one of them
and some early hits started a fire on the Idzumo. However, the return fire knocked a funnel out, reducing my speed.

The climax of the action. The Izumrud changes its mind and steams in to support, firing at the Idzumo. A lucky hit knocks out one of its forward guns and starts another fire, while the Peresviet takes another down. The Russians have the upper hand, but then a destroyer swoops in for a torpedo shot. A double hit sees the Peresviet start to ship water at an alarming rate!

After two more turns of close-range firing, two destroyers are sunk and the third limps away. Slowly, the Idzumo is battered from two sides and its fire starts to slacken. Listing heavily, the guns become unserviceable as the rising sea washes over them, before eventually the whole ship sinks slowly.

So a victory for the Russians. It was down to a single dice roll, however - when the Peresviet was torpedoed it scored a measly roll on the flood chart, meaning it could cope and carry on without stopping. A seven or an eight (rather than the three that was actually rolled) would have sunk the Peresviet as well and made it a costly draw. As it was the Russians limped back to base, very nearly sinking in rough seas.

It was a decisive and brutal game, perhaps because we knew it was a one-off we were a little reckless. The Battlefleet 1900 game is well suited to actions of this size and copes very well with the mix of ship types. The destroyers have a size of 1, whereas the battleships are 50 - but as the plucky torpedo shots demonstrated, anything afloat is a threat!

Comments

That's the downside - small actions like this are easy and quick to game, but with only one capital ship it can become a bit of a game of luck, if a chance hit causes a magazine explosion or something. I'm sure when we rematch the Japs will have their revenge!

Great report! I'm a bit of a naval history buff and I'm always looking for a good tabletop for WW2 level miniatures... I've seen another report around for Italians vs. Brits and it looked really compelling!

Hi, thanks for stopping by! Yes, WWII is another naval area we're looking to expand into. Most of my collection is 1860 - 1905 so I'm not very familiar with the producers of WWII models. These rules are great though, and I think will adapt well to different periods. Their only downside is the level of detail makes getting to know the rules quite an intensive process.

This game took just over an hour, but that was fairly quick because we were using 'tweaked' rules that give more hits and both knew the rules very well. Larger fleet actions with six or seven capital ships a side take a full day usually - even with those tweaked rules.

They were lucky to get those two off actually, that's always a feature of pre-dreadnought games when the ships are bristling with QF guns. Without criticizing my noble opponent, the best tactic is to wait until the crews are all busy fighting fires or doing damage control and the target is stationary, and use torpedoes to deliver the killing blow.